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The application of ultraviolet laser processing in the PCB industry

May 4, 2018

Laser cutting or drilling used in the PCB industry only requires several or a dozen of watts of laser instead of tens of thousands of watts of laser power. The application of flexible circuit board is becoming increasingly important in consumer products, automotive industry or robot manufacturing technology. As UV laser processing system has the advantages of flexible processing, high-precision processing effect and flexible & controllable processing procedure, it has become the first choice for soft circuit board and thin PCB Manufacturer laser drilling & cutting.

To today, the long working life of the laser source equipped in the laser system is basically close to maintenance free. In the production process, the rate of laser is set as the first degree, which is very safe and does not need other protective devices. The LPKF laser system is equipped with dust exhaust apparatus, so it won’t discharge any harmful substances. Coupled with the visualized and easily operated software control, layer technology is replacing traditional mechanical technique to save the cost of special cutting tools.

CO2 laser or UV laser?

For instance, in splitting or cutting board, CO2 laser system with a wave length of around 10．6μm can be chosen as the processing cost is low while the laser power can reach thousands of watts. Besides, it can produce a large amount of heat in the process of cutting, which result in the edges being seriously carbonized.

The length of UV laser is 355nm, which can easily conduct optical focusing. UV laser focusing of less than 20 watts of power can reduce the diameter of the facula to 20μm while the energy intensity can be comparable to the surface of the sun.

The advantage of UV laser processing:

UV laser is particularly suitable for hard board, flexible -hard board, flexible board and the cutting or marking of auxiliary materials. What are the advantages of this kind of laser technique?

UV laser cutting system exhibits huge technique advantages in circuit board splitting in SMT industry and micro-drilling in PCB industry. Based on differences in the thickness of circuit board materials, laser can conduct one-time or multiple cuttings along the edge when necessary. The thinner the material is; the quicker is the cutting speed. If the accumulated laser pulse is less than that the pulse required for penetrating the laser, it will only leave a scratch on the surface of the material. Therefore, QR code or bar code can be marked on the material to trace the following process.

The time UV laser’s impulse energy stays in the materials can be measured in terms of microsecond and there is no clear heating several micrometers away from the cutting. Therefore, there is no need to worry about that the heating it produces may damage the components. The circuit and welding point near the edge is normally in perfect condition without any blurs. In addition, integrated into CAM software, LPKFUV laser system can directly import data from CAD and edit the laser cutting route by itself and form the frame of laser cutting. After the corresponding processing parameter library is chosen, laser processing can be done. This kind of laser system is not only applied to mass production but also prototype production.

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